1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to aircraft and in particular to emergency and safety equipment for aircraft. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to securing emergency and safety equipment on aircraft.
2. Background
Airline procedures may be important to ensure the safety for passengers using air travel. Currently, inspections of the interior of an aircraft may be made to ensure that the required minimum equipment may be present before flight, for example, that life vests may be present in all passenger seats. Any missing equipment may be required to be replaced before flight.
Also, interior inspections may be made to prevent placement or identify prohibited objects and/or items in an aircraft in place of or with emergency equipment. The current inspections may be performed to ensure the finding of and/or disposing of these types of objects. Aircraft regularly undergo vigorous inspections each day, for example, while cleaning the aircraft between flights resulting in several man-hours per airplane per day. In addition, some emergency equipment, such as, for example without limitation, life vests are taken by passengers causing replacement costs to aircraft operators.
These and other types of inspections may be time consuming and may increase the amount of time needed between flights. These types of inspections may reduce the number of flights possible, as well as requiring increased personnel to perform inspections.
Attempts have been made to make inspections easier to perform. For example, life vests may be placed into boxes or compartments with doors. These doors may then be sealed with a tamper evident device. A tamper evident device may be a device that provides a visual indication when a sealed door becomes disturbed, moved, and/or tampered. As a result, a visual inspection may be quickly made to determine whether the tamper evident device is intact.
With respect to inspecting life vest pouches, an inspector may pull out the life vest, pat down the life vest, and perform a visual inspection of the inside of the pouch. This inspection may be performed for every seat every morning before the first flight of the day. Cleaning crews also may perform a cursory inspection of the vest and pouch to determine if the vest may still be in place.
Visually inspecting the spaces, including seat cushions, is labor intensive. This type of inspection increases expense and time to operate flights. Most spaces in an aircraft may not be accessed or tampered with the majority of the time.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus to overcome the problems described above.